As alot of you already know, RedHat has stopped releasing their product RedHat Linux. RedHat 9.0 is the last release. RedHat is concentrating on their Enterprise products only, while providing support for Fedora.

The major differences between Fedora Core and the old RedHat Linux are the shortening of the Release Cycle to 1 year vice 18 months and the stability of the software (Fedora Core is sort of like a cross between the old RedHat Rawhide and the RedHat released version ... with RedHat providing guidance, but the Fedora people controlling the software).

RedHat has sent an e-mail to their customers explaining the new policies, as well as this page on their website.

I had posted an earlier thread concerning some of these issue here at LinuxHelp.

I've been doing some research and I have found another very good solution to this problem. One that I think leverages the stability/compatability of Enterprise Linux with a cost I can live with (namely FREE)!

RHEL has an EULA that allows for the Source RPMs to be downloaded and rebuilt, producing a version of GNU / Linux that is freely usable and redistributable. There are some items that are in the source that are not allowed to be used (the comps file {the file that says what files are on which CD}, RedHat Icons and trademarks, and some others)....but functionally the file versions are compatable with the Enterprise Linux products.

I found two projects that are currently progressing nicely towards the goal of a stable Enterprise GNU/LInux that has a long release cycle and will support many third party applications.

WhiteBoxEL already has an RC1 downloadable, and although there are a couple minor issues, it is pretty much usable right now. It is based on the RHEL 3 source packages.

cAos expects their cAos GP (General Purpose) to be available in about 2 weeks. It is based on the RedHat Advanced Server 2.1 core. Thier GP-2 will be available when the 2.6 Kernel is released.

cAos also has a cAos2 EL that will be based on the RHEL 3 source packages.

Both of these projects will produce a quality product that should be freely deployable and redistributable based on the RHEL 3 source packages .... including security releases.

One thing I want to make clear is that I am not suggesting that you should deploy these solutions instead of RHEL on a critical production systems that require 24/7/365 technical support. RedHat has extremely an capable staff and support plans that will ensure your critical installations stay up .... and as my daddy always told me, "Son, you get what you pay for"! But if you are like me, on a shoestring budget, willing to provide your own technical support, willing to ask for help on mailing lists, and willing to take a chance, these projects may be just what the doctor ordered.

But, I think that the best distro is now CentOS. ChrisW and Robert83 both use CentOS ... and I'm not sure about Jim. I am also now the CentOS-4 project lead ... but that happened because I thought CentOS was the best distro and converted all my boxes over to it, then later I started a RHEL4 rebuild project and CentOS asked me to come be part of their distro.

There have been time issues concerning updates from WBEL, and Tao has lost their maintainer of x86_64, s390, s390x and ia64 distros ...

CentOS has many more mirrors than the other distos .. and in many more locations.